Life and Chaos

The last four months brought significant chaos into my life. Several large-scale changes all decided to pounce at once. A major remodeling project consumed half of my house, disrupting my writing schedule and my home-office workspace. I changed jobs, which threw a new set of wrenches into my work schedule. I finally decided to return to the vegan lifestyle which I had lived for a few years and then backslid from. That affected more aspects of my life than I had anticipated. We (like many others) had a very stormy winter. The city of Atlanta shut down twice due to snow and ice on the roads. I decided to get back into bike riding. I read (listened to) two and a half books of the Hunger Games trilogy — the last book for some reason did not capture my imagination. I switched cell phone providers, which included moving from an iPhone to an Android. In short … chaos, chaos, and more chaos took over my life for awhile. By the way, Chaos Chaos is the new name of one of my favorite bands from the 2000s.

My original idea for this blog was to keep it as strictly writing-related as possible — based on some advice I’d read in various author forums. However, I’ve decided to open it up to write about anything in my life. I hope it will be more generally appealing and interesting to readers, many of whom probably are not fascinated by the minutiae of the novel writing craft. Also, it will allow me to continue posting during the more chaotic periods in my life when other non-writing factors begin to take over. The topics that interest me the most right now vary widely — veganism, health, the biosphere, deliberate creation, writing (of course), parenting, education, music, and many many more.

So what’s the status of my next novel? Well, I’ll let you know in the next blog post. I did not actively work on it much during all this chaos, but I spent a good deal of time thinking about it and where I wanted the story to go. Now that things are re-approaching a semblance of normalcy, I intend to push through to the next stages of the process. Good luck to me.